Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 12

Being cut off in traffic, giving a presentation or missing a meal can all trigger a suite of physiological changes that allow the body to react swiftly to stress or starvation. Critical to this “fight-or-flight” or stress response is a molecular cycle that results in the activation of protein kinase A (PKA), a protein involved in everything from metabolism to memory formation. Now, a study by researchers at Penn State has revealed how this cycle resets between stressful events, so the body is prepared to take on new challenges.

The details of this reset mechanism, uncovered through a combination of imaging, structural and biochemical techniques, are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“Some of the early changes in the fight-or-flight response include the release of hormones, like adrenaline from stress or glucagon from starvation,” said Ganesh Anand, associate professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and lead author of the paper.

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Blood vessels are like big-city highways; full of curves, branches, merges, and congestion. Yet for years, lab models replicated vessels like straight, simple roads.

To better capture the complex architecture of real human , researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University have developed a customizable vessel-chip method, enabling more accurate vascular disease research and a drug discovery platform.

Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. These chips can be patient-specific and provide a non-animal method for pharmaceutical testing and studying . Jennifer Lee, a biomedical engineering master’s student, joined Dr. Abhishek Jain’s lab and designed an advanced vessel-chip that could replicate real variations in vascular structure.

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A research study led by Oxford University has developed a powerful new technique for finding the next generation of materials needed for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing. This could end a decades-long search for inexpensive materials that can host unique quantum particles, ultimately facilitating the mass production of quantum computers.

The results have been published in the journal Science.

Quantum computers could unlock unprecedented computational power far beyond current supercomputers. However, the performance of quantum computers is currently limited, due to interactions with the environment degrading the quantum properties (known as quantum decoherence). Physicists have been searching for materials resistant to quantum decoherence for decades, but the search has proved experimentally challenging.

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An analysis using unprecedented satellite observations reveals important information about how electrons get heated throughout the Universe.

What connects solar flares that induce space weather, geomagnetic storms that cause auroras, and magnetic disruptions that spoil confinement in magnetically confined fusion devices? All these events rapidly convert stored magnetic energy into kinetic energy of surrounding electrons and positively charged ions in the plasma state of matter. The energy conversion occurs via a fundamental process called magnetic reconnection [1]. But some aspects of reconnection remain poorly understood, despite decades of scrutiny through theoretical studies, ground-and satellite-based observations, lab experiments, and numerical simulations [2]. A key unresolved problem is determining how much of the released magnetic energy goes to the electrons and how much goes to the ions, and by what physical mechanisms this energization occurs.

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Life on Earth possesses an exceptional ability to self-reproduce, which, even on a simple cellular level, is driven by complex biochemistry. But can self-reproduction exist in a biochemistry-free environment?

A study by researchers from Harvard University demonstrated that the answer is yes.

The researchers designed a non-biochemical system in which synthetic cell-like structures form and self-reproduce by ejecting polymeric spores.

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Several key moments in Earth’s history help us humans answer the question “How did we get here?” These moments also shed light on the question “Where are we going?” and offer scientists deeper insight into how organisms adapt to physical and chemical changes in their environment.

Among them is an extended evolutionary occurrence over 2 billion years ago, known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). This marked the first time that oxygen produced by photosynthesis—essential for the survival of humans and many other life forms—began to accumulate in significant amounts in the atmosphere.

If you traveled back in time to before the GOE (more than 2.4 billion years ago), you would encounter a largely anoxic (oxygen-free) environment. The organisms that thrived then were anaerobic, meaning they didn’t require oxygen and relied on processes like fermentation to generate energy. Some of these organisms still exist today in extreme environments such as acidic hot springs and hydrothermal vents.

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